Summer Crossing A Novel [Hardcover]

USTruman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel,Other Voices, Other Rooms, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and accorded the author a prominent place among the writers of America's postwar generation. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (A Tree of Night, among others), novels and novellas (The Grass HarpandBreakfast at Tiffany's), some of the best travel writing of our time (Local Color), profiles and reportage that appeared originally inThe New Yorker(The Duke in His DomainandThe Muses Are Heard), a true-crime masterpiece (In Cold Blood), several short memiors about his childhood in the South (A Christmas Memory, The Thanksgiving Visitor, and One Christmas), two plays (The Grass HarpandHouse of Flowersand two films (Beat the devilandThe Innocents).

Mr. Capote twice won the O.Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in August 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.Chapter 1

“You are a mystery, my dear,” her mother said, and Grady, gazing across the table through a centerpiece of roses and fern, smiled indulgently: yes, I am a mystery, and it pleased her to think so. But Apple, eight years older, married, far from mysterious, said: “Grady is only foolish; I wish I were going with you. Imagine, Mama, this time next week you’ll be having breakfast in Paris! George keeps promising that we’ll go . . . I don’t know, though.” She paused and looked at her sister. “Grady, why on earth do you want to stay in New York in the dead of summer?” Grady wished they would leave her alone; still this harping, and here now was the very morning the boat sailed: what was there to say beyond what she’d said? AfterlÞ